New BlackBerry with hardware keyboard to launch during CES

We knew it was coming, but BlackBerry's long-awaited 'Mercury' handset is set to be announced at CES.

A teaser of the keyboard-sporting BlackBerry handset, which is now designed, overseen and built by TCL, Alcatel's parent company, was shown by Steve Cistulli, President of TCL, prior to the start of CES.

In mid-December, BlackBerry and TCL formalized their relationship, officially making the Canadian outfit a software company. TCL will still release BlackBerry-branded handsets, for which the former telecom giant will build the Android software.

According to previous rumors, the new keyboarded "Mercury" will feature an unusual 1620x1080 resolution with a 420 ppi pixel density, which works out to a 4.63-inch display size. There's also expected to be a Snapdragon processor of some sort (perhaps the 625), 3GB of RAM, and 32GB of internal storage.